My First Day of Succession Work

When we arrived at the Jones Walker law firm, they had a conference room set up for us and they had reserved work areas in the law library. After getting settled in, one of the firm’s employees provided all of the necessary support to get access to the internet and power to our laptops.

I had been assigned three clients, so I just jumped in and started reviewing their files. After reviewing the documents that were available, it was apparent that the best way for me to proceed would be to first construct a family tree. Some of the clients had provided a prior version of a Judgment of Possession for the property in question, so that gave me a good starting point. From there I would use any of the documents available to me including intake sheets, death certificates and meeting notes to add as much detail as possible. In conjunction with developing the family tree, I wrote up a list of questions that I needed to ask the client in order to fill in the blanks.

My next step was to fill out the Succession Questionnaire and once again, the required information came from a variety of sources. In addition to the documents in the client’s file, we used several internet resources to try and find information related to our clients’ succession claims. These web sites included the tax assessor’s office for Jefferson Parish and the Obituary Pages and Death Records databases in Westlaw. Based on the information required for the Succession Questionnaire, I continued to develop a more extensive of list of questions for my clients.

I then attempted to contact each of my clients to introduce myself and explain what my role would for the next few days. I had to leave voicemail messages for two of them, but I was able to speak to the third. Based on my review of his file, I told him what documents were still needed and asked him the series of questions that I had prepared related to his case. Since he did not have all of the information at his immediate disposal, we scheduled a face-to-face meeting for Wednesday afternoon.

As we were wrapping up for the day, I received call backs from my other two clients. They were both very thankful for our assistance and very willing to provide me with all of the necessary information. I will be having a phone meeting with one of them on Tuesday morning and with the other on Wednesday morning.

Overall, it was a very productive and rewarding day of work. At first it was a bit overwhelming because some of the files didn’t contain a great deal of information or provide a logical starting point. After getting a handle on things, however, the pieces started to fall into place and I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the week. I truly believe we can provide a tremendous service to these people during our brief stay in New Orleans.